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Good news!

Today I found some healthy-looking Echinacea seedlings at my experimental plot in Perch Lake WPA near Leola, SD.
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The DNR sprayed this area (including my plot) last week, in an effort to eradicate yellow toadflax. It seems that my seedlings were shielded by the tall grass. It’s also likely that the seedlings are not in a rapidly growing stage, so they may have been less vulnerable than other broad-leaf plants.

Here’s another picture:
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Seedling searches finished!

We finished searching for seedlings at the last site (Staffanson Prairie Preserve) on Monday. All the datasheets & maps (163 pages) are now organized in a 3-ring binder.

Here are a few highlights:

We found total of …
> 22+1+5+1+8+2+24+4+13+0+5+7+1+0
[1] 93
… ninety-three seedlings at fourteen sites!

In August we’ll go back and check the fate of every one of those seedlings. I hope we can find them all!
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Mimi, Amanda, Greg, Allegra, Daniel, Caroline, and Gretel
looking for seedlings on the scraped roadside at Riley’s site.
(They didn’t find any here.)

Two possible Echinacea seedlings (not counted above) were noted. We should go back to check their identity within the next week. At site NWLF we left a pin flag at focal plant #13073. At site ERI the possible Echinacea seedling was at R102 (see page 97). Help me remember to check these!

We found about 500 other Echinacea plants within the circles, mostly juvenile plants and some adults (flowering and not).
> 16+16+25+131+63+33+73+24+46+5+16+46+6+11
[1] 511

The roadsides at sites ER and ERI were scraped. In the area that was scraped, all the tags are gone. We did see many little Echinacea leaves peeking through the gravel, but no seedlings. In some areas the scraping was deeper and some roots of old plants were pulled out. I collected one pulled root from the S side of the road on the W half of RI; I couldn’t tell from where it was yanked. IMG_8873.JPG

The root was huge!

With our very precise maps of plants from previous years, we will be able to identify which plants are gone and which persist. It will be a challenge though. In some dense areas we may not be able to figure it out. Stay tuned, we’ll bring the detailed maps and try to figure it all out in August, after peak flowering.

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Gretel determining the identity of individual Echinacea plants
at the scraped roadside at Riley’s.

The scraped gravel was piled in the ditches. Some plants in the ditches were buried and I expect that many of them will die. There will probably be a lot of weeds in and around those piles for the next few years (until the perennials take over again). IMG_9216.JPG

Two images (above & below) of the piles of gravel deposited
in the ditch on the S side of the road at Riley’s.

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Another highlight (no photos though):

It was a pleasure to visit Staffanson. Gretel and I mapped the focal locations on Sunday and saw a patch of Cypripedium calceolus in flower (past prime). Almost every focal plant in the West unit (unburned) had spittlebug spittle on it. Almost none of the focal plants in the East unit (burned) had spit.

We didn’t use the tripod to take photos. The camera didn’t attach well and the remotetrip feature isn’t ready yet. We’ll need to work on the tripod and practice using it. I think it holds great potential to speed up and improve our protocol.

First week, seedling search procedures, and project proposal

My name is Allegra Halverson and I am from New Hampshire. I am an undergraduate student in Botanical Science at McGill University in Montreal, and a recent addition to Team Echinacea. Lots of things happened this week, so here are a few highlights:

We moved into the old town hall and I’ve been loving the bike ride to the farm in the mornings so everyone with access to a bike should bring it!

I saw a garter snake, two frogs, two deer, ground squirrels, a wild turkey and lots of birds.

Gretel and I selfed Megan J’s prairie turnip plants at the landfill site on Wednesday. We also helped Andrea put out flags and fungal traps in the CG for her mycorrhizae project.

I started my plant collection at the landfill and common garden with 15 plants so far. I have to make a plant collection for a class next winter and will also make one for the Echinacea project at the same time to help future newbies with plant identification.

During this first week we received a lot of background information on the project and began the planning stages of our own projects related to the larger questions about Echinacea in the fragmented prairie habitat. Several projects surrounding the question of competition for pollinators were chosen along with pollen identification projects and one project about the aphids. My project will focus on how inter-specific pollen landing on Echinacea flowers effects style persistence. pollen competition proposal.doc

We developed a new key for the labeling seedling search maps:
-each plant in the circle has a dot with line drawn to the center and the distance (cm) to the focal plant written on the line

s with a circle around it: a seedling
B with a circle around it: a basal plant, not flowering
* with a circle around it: a flowering plant, should have a metal tag like this 7819.2 (.2 is the number of flowering heads)
N with a circle around it: a nail with a metal tag on it

any plot with a plant found in it, other than the focal plant, had a map made for it.
any plot with a seedling found in it was photographed and a pencil marker with a letter (for basal or seedlings) or number (for numbered plants) was placed 2 cm west of all plants
a toothpick was placed 5 cm from the seedling towards the focal plant

am i missing anything?

specialized camera stand

Three engineering students from Northwestern’s Engineering Design and Communication class built a specialized camera stand for the Echinacea project. Michelle Pineda, Christopher Moran, and HengJie Tan designed and built a giant tripod which we will use to improve our protocol for relocating Echinacea seedlings.
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I told them about the paper maps we made by hand and how last summer Ben & Christine worked out a method to flag seedlings and make maps from digital images. To avoid issues with parallax they determined that photos had to be taken from fairly high up (at least 2.9 m from the ground).

Then the main problem was taking photos straight down from such a height. The hang-a-camera-from-a-pole method wasn’t stable enough (or safe). Michelle, Chris & Heng designed several scaled-down prototypes for their class project. Christine and I looked them over and then, based on our feedback and class feedback, they built this stand…

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They presented the stand to their class and me on Saturday, along with a detailed report. I can’t wait to try it out! We will try it out this summer. We hope to avoid making paper maps altogether. We’ll see if it works!

plants flagged at lf site for seedling search

I flagged 20 spots at the landfill site last Saturday. 18 are centered on Echinacea plants that flowered last year (blue flags). 2 are random locations (orange flags). Amy and Caroline are going there tomorrow to search for seedlings.

I noted other plants that were flowering on the east hill:
Zizia aurea
Lithospermum canescens
Sisyrinchium (1 pla)
Viola pedatifida
Astragalus sp.
Pediomelum esculentum – just about to start
Geum triflorum – done
Commandra umbellata – mostly done

On the west hill I noted these:
Senecio (1 pla)
Taraxacum officinale
Antennaria neglecta – done

seedlings found!

We searched for Echinacea seedlings in six prairie remnants last week. We found some! Over 2+ days eight of us found 57 seedlings.

Ruth and Georgiana found 5 seedlings in this circle (41 cm radius) centered on plant 12034 at Steven’s approach.

We visited 87 circles. Ten of the circles were centered on random points in the remnants and the rest were centered on plants that flowered last year. The random points were all at least 1.5 m from every plants that flowered last year and within 4 m of one or more plants that flowered last year. The radii were 41 cm in 4 remnants and 50 cm in the other two. The total area searched was 51.3 square meters.

We also noted that there were about a gross other Echinacea plants in these circles. Some were tagged from previous year, others not.

We changed our protocol from last year and pairs differed in data they recorded and map notations. When we go back to the remaining nine sites in two weeks we should follow this protocol:

we must have at least two measurements to every seedling noted on the map
we must have at least one measurements to every basal plant noted on the map
make a map for every circle where any plant is found
note the style of every toothpick placed (round, square, colored, striped, etc)
note all plants that are determined to be just outside the circle on the map
We need consistent map notation for seedlings, basal plants, focal plants, flowering plants, tagged plants, nails

Also we need to get more pencils, thumbtacks, and cards with containers to hold it all.

Here are some photos of us searching and photos of places where we found some seedlings…

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There were eight of us searching, Amber Eule-Nashoba, Ruth Shaw, and Stuart Wagenius searched Thursday & Friday. Georgiana May searched on Thursday. Gina Quiram searched on Friday. Caroline Ridley, Amy Dykstra, and Kate B searched on Friday (after driving across South Dakota to search for seedlings there earlier in the week). [Note to SW: Kate B is KD on datasheets.]

On Thursday we found one circle at SGC that was overrun by poison ivy. Lacking protection, Amber and I decided not to venture in. On Saturday I went back to the circle with neoprene gloves. I removed some poison ivy and then searched the circle. Alas, I found none.

Seedling searches at Hegg Lake

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The classic seedling search position.

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Young Echinacea seedling–cotyledons only.

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Larger seedling with a true leaf.

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We marked seedlings with colored toothpicks, so we can re-find them in August, and again next summer. I hope to be able to learn about initial seedling establishment as well as seedling survival through the first two seasons.

Seedling search at Hegg Lake

Amy and I have been out at Hegg Lake since Tuesday afternoon, searching low and lower for Echinacea seedlings in my small “next generation genetic rescue” experiment and Amy’s crossing and local adaptation experiments. We’re finding quite a few seedlings- they’re mostly just cotyledons (some amazingly with their little seed coats still attached) and about a quarter have put out their first true, very fuzzy leaf. Without the true leaves, the seedlings can be tricky to tell apart from the seedlings of one or two other species, but we’ve developed a fairly good search image and are making notes of questionable identifications.
Mode number of seedlings for each “position,” that is a batch of 5-40 achenes sown: 0
Maximum seedlings found in a position in my experiment: 12
Maximum seedlings found in a position in Amy’s experiment: 10
I’ll also brag and mention that today I found the seedling with the longest true leaf so far at 42 mm. Looked to me like the plucky guy was flipping the bird. Ah, Amy and I certainly do succeed at keeping ourselves and each other entertained.
We completed searches for my experiment on Tuesday, made it through the crossing experiment Wednesday and today and plan to finish up with the local adaptation experiment tomorrow. Photos are forthcoming.

Demography

This is the last week with Team Echinacea this summer. We still have some plants to measure in the common garden experiment and there are still some plants flowering. We’ll get this done! Our main plan this week is to visit plants in the prairie remnants to see if they are alive. Last week we made a good start, but got rained out on Friday and the previous Monday (over 3″ of rain).

We’ve been to 4 remnant Echinacea populations and refound the seedlings that we identified & mapped in May or June. We have 8 remnants to visit this week. Our maps have worked quite well–we have found almost all of the locations and the majority of seedlings were still alive.

We also have to map the new flowering plants in our remnants and note which old plants are flowering this year. That’s a big job and we are making progress. We won’t finish all the sites, so we’ll have to come back this fall. But I hope we can finish up all of the big sites.

Assessing the survival and reproduction of Echinacea plants is important for understanding the population dynamics of these remnant populations. We want to know if the populations are growing (and perhaps expanding), holding their own, or shrinking (and perhaps heading toward local extinction).

We call our visits to remnants to find and refind plants “demography,” or demo for short. We call mapping the plants surveying because we use a survey station.

Click here to read our equipment list:

DEMO/SURV Equipment list

each person
pen
compass
8-m tape
radio
visor
tags
flag bag
flags–two colors

all
clipboards
binders
safety triangle
metal detector
reel tapes & pins

Survey station
station
battery
2 poles
tripod
box:
prisms
data collector
power cord/transformer
data cord

Find the Seedlings!

I’m working on improving our seedling search protocol, using perhaps photography, a physical grid, or some combination of things. Here’s a couple photos I took to test out a locating device: toothpick plus coffee stirrer plus thumbtack. The first photo is in easier short foliage conditions and has two red markers and a blue marker somewhere in the 1m diameter circle marked by the meter sticks. The second photo is in more difficult high foliage and has two red, a blue, and a white. All are visible in both pictures, but perhaps not immediately apparent. Happy hunting!

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